With a global population now exceeding 8 billion, we need a fundamentally new system of making to meet the rapidly growing needs of our planet's population. Our current material supply chain is built on fossil fuels — a finite and shrinking resource — and designed for the linear path of plastics: extraction, manipulation, consumption, landfill. And at every step, this process leaches toxins and pollutants into our precious ecosystems, compromising the health of our communities and planet.  

We cannot recycle our way free. We must remake how we make, drawing on nature’s extraordinary abundance: More new plant matter grows in an average day on earth than the sum total of all the petroleum-derived materials mankind produces in a year. 

In this keynote, NFW founder and CEO Dr. Luke Haverhals details the systemic shift already underway with the world’s most iconic makers to an entirely different framework for material science: scaling plastic-free, nutrient-based material manufacturing and designing the global supply chain to work with – instead of against – planet earth.